SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
are natural assets, and they have been greatly added to by a network of 
broad and narrow-gauge railways which have been laid down wherever 
there is need, and which are operated under conditions which make their 
use peculiarly favorable to manufacturers within the districts which 
they serve. ; 
The mere possession of such facilities, however, does not make an 
industry, and a glance at the story of the growth of their chemical in- 
dustry will indicate at once that this is so. The manufacture of the 
so-called heavy chemicals is the oldest branch of applied chemistry, and 
in this Britain has for a long time taken a leading place. As a “ large” 
industry, both in the home trade and for export, alkali and acid manu- 
facture and the production of articles of trade in which these substances 
are employed had been in British hands for many years before Germany 
became a manufacturing nation. It was natural that the development 
of chemical manufacture in Germany should be along the line of least 
resistance offered by the field of organic chemistry, a line indicated by 
Perkins’ discovery of aniline-purple or mauve, in 1856, followed by the 
production of aniline-red or magenta, by Vergius in 1859. I mention 
these years, familiar enough as they are, in order that more emphasis 
may be given to the fact that within a very few years after them the 
foundations of the greatest German firms were laid. Bayer and Co., 
Meister, Lucius and Briining, Kalle and Co., and the Chem. Fabrik 
Griesheim were all founded in 1863; whilst the Badische Anilin-und 
Sodafabrik was started in 1865. 
Nothing in their small beginnings could indicate how rapid would 
be their growth, and how small these beginnings were is shown by the 
fact that Meister, Lucius and Briining, which, as the Farbwerke Hochst, 
employed, in 1914, about 8,000 workmen and over 300 chemists, found 
its work efficiently carried out in 1863 by the five workmen it then em- 
ployed. 
It is to be noted also that the men required to carry on the work of 
developing these concerns were already trained and at hand. The im- 
portance of the field of organic chemistry had already been estimated 
by such chemists as Liebig, Wohler, Kekulé, and others, and their 
students were ready for the work required of them in the new factories. 
The advance was rapid, and the training of new men in the principles 
of research became an integral part of their university career. It was 
thought fitting for members of the best families in the country to take 
up the study of applied science, and honours and high positions were 
awarded to those who attained to eminence in it. The effect of such 
increased opportunities for study and the honours bestowed upon 
successful students inevitably created an extraordinarily large supply 
of trained men, with the result that salaries were always low, and firms 
could afford to select only the cream of the applicants that were always 
present in numbers whenever a vacancy in their staffs occurred. 
The law of supply and demand should have operated to check this 
fulness in the market of trained intellects, but another and powerful 
stimulus began to make itself felt, a stimulus which still retained the 
attraction of recognised status in society, so dear to the German, and 
yet saved them in large measure from the necessity of undergoing the 
full term of three years’ military training which it was necessary by 
Ito 
